The Complex Christ

On Meaning [3] | Absolute Truth | Power | Stages of Faith

On Meaning [1]  | On Meaning [2]

In the previous two posts I have been trying to set out why I still hold to a position that absolute truth exists. The discussion began as a meditation on meaning and language, and I've tried to make the connection between these and truth.

I ended the last post by positing that an extreme relativist position leads to difficult corners where it is impossible to make sensible statements about right and wrong, and thus leads us into moral difficulties. But also that, even though I believed in absolute truth, because the only way we can exchange ideas/thoughts in the public domain is through the porous and ever-negotiable means of language, I didn't expect to be able to explain fully why. It boils back down to the faith/doubt axes.

To explain further: while I believe absolute truth exists, I don't believe that any one person or group of people have full access to that truth.

I think this has 2 major implications:

Technorati Tags: Absolute Truth, Church, Emerging Church, Justice, Language, Meaning, Post Modernism, Postmodernism, Power, Religion, Science, Theology

On Meaning [2]

It's been a knackering week, so this is going to be even more lacking 'meaning' than it's going to anyway, but here we go with part two.

In response to the previous post 'on meaning', Nic wrote:

[I want to react against] some sort of pre-ordained meaning, rules of engagement or ‘isness’- a divine database with tags that define ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ usage. Any illegal use (which I love) automatically stands outside the official cannon, rendering it relative. This is why I don’t understand the notion of absolute with all its borders and restraints. It’s the space of the ‘bottom-inspectors’ and the elites...

I thought it might be interesting to add to that a quote from the godfather of Neoconservatism, Leo Strauss:

"Western liberalism has led to nihilism, and undergone a development that has taken everything praiseworthy and admirable out of human beings and made us into dwarf animals satisfied with a life in which nothing is true and everything is permitted.

"People believe that the liberal idea of individual freedom leads people to question everything - all values, all moral truths. Instead people are led by their own selfish desires. And this threatens to tear apart the shared values which held society together."

I'd better now state that I'm not a neo-con (!), but if the opposite of that (as Strauss would like us believe) is a wooly liberal for whom everything is relative and everything goes, then I'm not that either, and I want to try to set over the next few posts a) why I believe in absolute truth and b) i) what some caveats to that are and ii) what relevance that might have to us practically.

Technorati Tags: Absolute Truth, Auschwitz, Environment, Holocaust, Justice, Meaning, Post Modernism, Postmodernism, Abuse, Religion, Theology

Leadership Day This Saturday

Looking forward to spending this Saturday discussing leadership issues at the first Blah... learning day, with Anna Draper, Jonny Baker and Paul Roberts. I'll be sharing some thoughts first published here.

Book [ here ]

Technorati Tags: Emerging Church, Ministry, Theology, Westminster

On Meaning [1] | Absolute Truth

A few weeks ago Nic and Jonathan and I had one of our occasional drinks at the Crown and Greyhound and ended up in a very politely heated debate on 'meaning', which we are planning to jointly thrash out here and over at Haunted Geographies (though not sure exactly when he'll be posting).

It had started innocently enough. Nic asked how Sigur Ros was, and I mentioned my thoughts about music being somehow 'beyond language'. He argued that without language there can be no meaning. And I want to try to explore why I disagree with that, and why I think that disagreement is important, rather than totally academic - which I'll probably get to in the next post. So bear with us.

My hunch that began the conversation was that there is a meaning behind language that we, very occasionally, get a glimpse of.

Technorati Tags: Absolute Truth, Emerging Church, Language, Meaning, Postmodernism, Post Modernism, Religion, Theology

Final Salute | Pulitzer Feature Photography Prize

Full series of images from Tom Heisler's excellent winning series [ here ]

Technorati Tags: Iraq War, Pulitzer, Photography, Terrorism

The Race Card | An Emerging Response?

Local Council elections are due in the UK shortly, and there has been some media attention given to surveys that suggest that up to a quarter of voters 'have thought of voting for the British National Party'. The BNP are a dangerous bunch; tricksters in the most cunning of modes. Their door to door campaign has focused on widespread grievances such as council housing, state education etc and on promoting 'Christian values'. Their website spouts:

Can you just sit there and watch as our country is being ripped apart by the forces of multiculturalism? The BNP cannot do anything without your full and active support - join, donate, get involved. Today is the day to do something.

Feeling despondent or depressed, perhaps bewildered by daily events?
Feeling angry about news the newspapers and television stations are reporting?
Feeling ignored, abandoned and forgotten by Blair's regime?
Feeling ripped off by the Big Brother Government and the corporate giants?
Feeling exploited, over taxed but unrepresented on your local council or in parliament?
You are not alone.

Millions - your next door neighbours, others in your street, your village, district, suburb and housing estate - feel exactly the same way. Many good people, just like yourself are afraid to make too many comments publicly because it is seen as a sin to make mention of one's fears and concerns. Well there is a solution, an answer to your understandable concerns and that is to look at the pages of the website of the British National Party. If you agree with what we say, then stop remaining silent, work with us to regain control of our country and our future.

Of course, the racist agenda that is the root of their movement is only subtly mentioned, and this has proved attractive to many, particularly in the inner cities.

One voter interviewed stated 'we didn't vote for this influx of ethnic minorities - we didn't get a chance to decide whether or not they should be allowed in. The government just went right ahead and did it without caring what the effects would be.'

I actually think their point is valid. The government has followed policies to support multiculturalism, but I don't think over the past 60 years enough has been done to 'bring the people with them'.

In other words, the 'multicultural project' is absolutely right, but is a project that is actually more difficult than people have imagined. Our inherited human nature appears to be naturally averse to 'the other'. And this is where the BNP's guff about 'Christian Values' totally breaks down. Jesus' own summary of the gospel was 'love each other; love The Other'. The divine in us celebrates multiculturalism, rejoices in difference.

People are scared of being 'swamped by other cultures', but the Christian response might be based on the idea of the Trinity: each member keeps their own distinct identity, while also having a wider unity. The fears people have of English culture being swamped are precisely because they are not clear about what this identity is.

How can the emerging church respond? First, by continuing to celebrate and embrace diversity. But also by reaching out to those in our inner cities and helping them to find a secure identity on which to build a love for the other.

Technorati Tags: BNP, British National Party, London, Multiculturalism, Politics, Race, Racism

Nature in the City | Mango Body Whips | Resurrection Hope

Back from Scotland. Fine times. Even got some golf in ;-)

One of the finest pleasures was reading this article by Jenny Price in The Believer. She's a nature writer. Who lives in Central LA. And her reflections on the genre of nature writing in the midst of the city is just fabulous:

“Is there nature in L.A.?” people typically respond when I say I write about nature in this town. But I have ended up here happily, and [another writer] has just returned, exactly because L.A. has become the finest place in America to think and write about nature.

'"Soon after I moved to L.A., a woman who ran into my car while it was parked on the USC campus left a note on the back of a receipt for a mango body whip, which she’d purchased at SkinMarket at the Beverly Center mall. What’s a mango body whip? I didn’t know. Skin product? More perverse? I made a trip to the Center, and found out that it’s a mango-infused thick and buttery skin cream.

'Nature stories abound in such an encounter. Begin with the mangoes. Follow them, and you can tell an intricate set of stories as farm workers harvest mangoes in rural Mexico, and drivers truck them into the L.A. area and into the SkinMarket factory in Simi Valley—just over the L.A. County line—where workers use industrial technologies to turn them into skin butter, and distributors transport them to upscale malls like the Beverly Center, and shoppers cart them away to bathrooms in adjacent Beverly Hills and West Hollywood and to other places throughout the country.

'Mango body whip stories, in other words, look for and follow the nature we use, and watch it move in and out of the city, to track specifically how we transform natural resources into the mountains of stuff with which we literally build cities and sustain our urban lives.'

If you enjoyed the 'Christ in the City' chapter of The Complex Christ, I highly recommend reading the whole essay, and getting hold of the second part in the next issue. And a happy Easter too. It's only the resurrection, with its robust view of things made new, not destroyed, that enables us to see our urban spaces as places rich with divine hope.

Technorati Tags: Beauty, Environment, L.A., Los Angeles, Nature

'It Is Finished'

Death, terror and self-determination.

On this Good Friday, I thought a link to this reflection was appropriate.

Peace.

Via Crucis Grid Blog: The Cross

"

An image which frequently appears among the archetypal configurations of the unconscious is that of the tree or the wonder-working plant."
Carl Jung

The Golden Bough, the Burning Bush, the Tree of Life, the Forbidden Fruit, Golden Flower, Ambrosia... The healing plant has a long history, and appears to be 'rooted' in our very subconscious as a potent symbol of life and transformation.

So how does the Cross fit in? It is clearly part of the 'healing plant' archeype, but perhaps with some essential differences. For the tree that Christ hangs on on this Good Friday has been ripped from the ground. It has no roots anymore. It has been 'manufactured' by humankind. Given shape and form by technologies. This healing tree is therefore in touch with death.

As God hangs dying, the two poles of creation and death meet, and within their potential difference lies our healing, our re-rooting, our re-grafting. Separated from the earth, hung above it, God is then thrust in death into the earth's dirty bowels. It is here, in these places where the two poles are forced together that our ressurection begins.

Off | Bandit Baker

I'm Scotland-bound later today for an Easter break. They have bird-flu there. Great. Should be nice and quiet ;-)
I think they'll have wireless, but probably only the bakelite sort that sings out 'The Archers', so doubt I'll be posting or commenting, though I've set up a couple of things pre-post for the GridBlog.

Have fun in my absence, and why not have a read of Malcolm Chamberlain, who's just started blogging. He'll be well worth reading, I can vouch for that.
Enjoy the Master's golf too... A cheeky someone told me over drinks today how Jonny has resisted blogging about his golf habit as he thought it might 'lower his stock'... Rubbish! The campaign to hear about his Emerging Golf Mission begins here. No doubt being a Baker he's a real bandit ;-)

Happy Easter.

Technorati Tags: Easter, Golf